Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Murderous Conservative Incompetence

Here's the Transit Safety Board's report on the Lac Magnetic rail disaster. Apparently it's pretty damning.
Transport Canada was slammed Tuesday in a long-awaited report into last summer's train disaster that claimed the lives of 47 people, for not forcing Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway to improve its safety record.
"Each time (Transport Canada inspectors) were saying, 'OK, we found this, you've got to do this,' but nobody was looking at it from a big-picture point of view to say, 'Have we got a systemic problem? Have we got a pattern here?' " Wendy Tadros, president of the Transportation Safety Board, said in an interview.
Time and again, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, owners of the errant train involved in the Lac-Mégantic disaster, were found to have lax safety standards, yet no government inspectors stayed on top of the problem until it was fixed.
This is what the "pro-business" bullshit of right-wing idiots means in practice. And you'll notice that nobody is resigning. harper is hiding in the Arctic apparently, leaving Lisa Raitt to mouth banalities in response to her government's gruesome failure.

It's always like this. The Wall Street disaster was ushered in by right-wing politicians who showed themselves wielding giant prop scissors cutting red tape.

It has been "conservative" governments that make meat products deadly dangerous to eat.

It has been "conservative" governments who make it deadly dangerous to drink water.

Hospitals fall apart; police go ape-shit, bridges collapse. Tailing ponds leak. Trains derail. Pipelines crack.

I have no fear that I'll ever meet a right-winger who will cause me to reconsider my beliefs. The governments they support are generally the stupidest, greediest, most corrupt conceivable.

Their trollish defenders will mewl and whine and snigger. But they're stupid scum.

2 comments:

theo said...

Not on topic, but you can decide if you want to publish this:

I cry a lot. Sometimes it is joy, which is a good thing. However, ever since the ascension of Reagan in the USA, I have seen more and more of the authoritarian and corporatocracy infect the the so-called democracies of the world. Corporations run the Western democracies, not the citizens who reside in them. Because the Western democracies essentially drive the planet I have seen over the last 30+ years a devolvement of cooperation to the benefit of a few global entities whose only raison d’etre relies on the next quarter.

China, of course, changes that particular dynamic because they have a history of thinking very long term and if the corporations don’t follow their advice, heads are removed. China is becoming the driving economic force in the world and as corporations are run by sociopathic scum that have no moral ethics whatsoever the Western democracies are particularly vulnerable to the the long term thinking of China.

So I cry more often in sadness than in joy. The USA, which for all its faults, I once regarded as the greatest of countries, has become an idiotocracy. Someone once said, “Shit tends to float”. Never were truer words spoken in regards to the US electoral system and sadly, it has become gamed to that fact. The shit are the ones that get the money to compete at the electoral level. Any person of moral conscience that succeeds is denigrated and thrown to the sidelines of public discourse unless it serves a narrative of corporate advantage. The internet has alleviated that a tiny bit, but realistically, no.

The planet is facing monumental challenges due to man-made climate changes. These changes are already affecting all of us. Nothing is being done on the Western democracy side because that might affect the next quarterly earnings of the corporations that run them. As an aside, the corporatocracy knows their actions are ultimately going to kill BILLIONS of us. There is no other possible outcome. They say otherwise. They lie. Realistically, the planet cannot support the people that live currently on it. Yet, we, as a species, continue to propagate beyond that. Do you think China does not consider these scenarios?

So I cry. My grandchildren very likely will live through hell, or die. I regret to say that hate fills a large portion of my character. I try and balance that through my art which I do simply on the hope I make people smile. Then I read of of Robin Williams. A person who made tens of millions smile over the decades and he killed himself. I wonder if it was his inner demons that truly made him take his life or was it those demons attacked his sense of helplessness that he felt observing the world in 2014. I know I feel that way but I do not suffer from clinical depression. If I did, I am pretty sure I would be dead.

thwap said...

Not off topic at all Theo.

They really don't care about us. They really don't care if millions die.

All they care about is profit and more profit. And control.

One caveat: About China, ... I once saw a chart about all the major world industries, and US-controlled firms dominate 3/4ths of them.